"Balzac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idolized the fine arts, the sculpture and painting and the literature of that country. The worldwide appreciation of Rodin had its origin in Germany—we esteem Anatole France, Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, as if they were German authors. We have a deep affection for the people of South France. We find passionate admirers of Mistral in small German towns, in alleys, in attics. It was deeply to be regretted that Germany and France could not be friends ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... separated one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless salon, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another comedie humaine unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... knowledge obtained through the imagination, and the other of conceptual knowledge obtained through the intellect.[7] Similar to the distinction expressed by Croce in the words imaginative and intellectual, is that expressed by Eastman in the words poetical and practical.[8] And according to Renard, Balzac distinguishes two classes of writers: the writers of ideas and the writers ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... Balzac says, judges only by results; and those who were themselves only practical in some specialty, or had made fortunes for themselves out of the gratuity of nature, were wont to look upon Wasson as a visionary and unpractical person. To those who acted only ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... strictly by a self-imposed routine, and was so little addicted to what Scott called "bed-gown and slipper tricks," that he never sat down to work or received a visitor until he was fully dressed. He had none of Wagner's luxurious tastes or Balzac's affectations in regard to a special attire for work, but when engaged on his more important compositions he always wore the ring given him by the King of Prussia. In Haydn's case there are no incredible tales of ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... and, if born in any other epoch, he would probably have done valuable (though never first rate) work; but by glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and England only an effervescence from the cloaca maxima of the putrid instincts which fasten themselves ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... example, let us compare Poe's short-story, "The Cask of Amontillado," with Conan Doyle's "The New Catacomb." In both of these the theme is revenge, brought about by having the one seeking to entomb his enemy alive—the same theme, precisely, as Balzac had used earlier in "La Grande Breteche," and Edith Wharton in later years in "The Duchess at Prayer." In "The Cask of Amontillado," Montresor desires to be revenged upon Fortunato because the latter has both injured and insulted him. Exactly how he has been insulted we are not told; nor do we ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... oneself; the French-cooked dinner as much as the pot of beer; the game of chance, whether with clean cards at a club or with greasy ones in a tap-room; the outdoing of one's neighbours, whether by the ragged heroes of Zola or the well-groomed heroes of Balzac, require no such coming forward of the soul: they take us, without any need for our giving ourselves. Hence, as I have just said, the preference for them does not imply original baseness, but only lack of higher energy. We can judge ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... such an art of distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France for Balzac." ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) had some influence on the French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... And now towards this point he finally transported himself by gradual movements which he believed appeared unstudied and indifferent. He was confronted by a good deal of French—to him an unfamiliar language. Here a long row of Balzac; then, the Waverley Novels in faded red cloth of very old date. Racine, Moliere, Bulwer following in more modern garb; Shakespeare in a compass that promised very small type. His quick trained glance sweeping ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... the island. One official gentleman from Lisbon, quite an accomplished man, who spoke French fluently and English tolerably, had some five hundred books, chiefly in the former tongue, including seventy-two volumes of Balzac. His daughter, a young lady of fifteen, more accomplished than most of the belles of the island, showed me her little library of books in French and Portuguese, including three English volumes, an odd selection,—"The Vicar of Wakefield," Gregory's "Legacy to his Daughters," ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... especially the language of society, because society is, theoretically, the playful encounter of sprightliness and wit. It is the worst language I know of for poetry, ethics, and the habit of the Saxon mind. It is wonderful in the hands of such masters as Balzac and George Sand, and is especially adapted to their purposes. Yet their books are forbidden to Nancy Fungus, Tabby Dormouse, Daisy Clover, and all their relations. They read Telemaque, and long to be married, that they may pry into Leila and Indiana: their French meanwhile, even if they ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... admirations in literature. They have been and are Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoievski and, now, Stendhal...." writes Baroja in the preface to the Nelson edition of La Dama Errante ("The Wandering Lady"). He follows particularly in the footprints of Balzac in that he is primarily a historian of morals, who has made a fairly ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... is good, and so is Thackeray, And so's Jane Austen in her pretty way; Charles Dickens, too, has pleased me quite a lot, As also have both Stevenson and Scott. I like Dumas and Balzac, and I think Lord Byron quite a dab at spreading ink; But on the whole, at home, across the sea, The author I like best is ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... Balzac's [104] studies had led him over a wide range of thought and speculation, and his shadowing forth of physiological truth in this strange story may have been intentional. At any rate, the matter of life is a veritable peau de chagrin, and for every vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... After them came names half literary, half political, such as MM. Cousin, Salvandy, Yillemain, Thiers, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, Mignet, Vitet, Cave, Merimee, and Guizot. Others, who were not yet known, but were coming forward, were Balzac, Soulie, De Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Auguste Barbier, Alphonse Karr, Theophile Gautier. Madame Sand was not known until her "Indiana," in 1828. I knew all this constellation, some of them as friends ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... and publisher will be given in the second volume of this series; and it is not uninteresting to observe that the witness, William Young, is none other than the asserted original of the immortal Mr Adams himself. He might, on Balzac's plea in a tolerably well-known anecdote, have demanded half of the L183, 11s. Of the other origins of the book we have a pretty full account, partly documentary. That it is "writ in the manner of Cervantes," and is intended as a kind of comic epic, is the author's own statement—no ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... orientation for our people. It was Sally Owen who said, when certain citizens declared that Mr. James was inaudible, that many heard him perfectly that night in the Propylaeum who had always thought Balzac the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... pleasanter for having fewer boys; we got more intimate with each other, and with the masters too. During the winter M. Bonzig told us capital stories—Modeste Mignon, by Balzac—Le Chevalier de Maison-rouge, by A. Dumas ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... which they like most or least. It is so with all famous novels. Then, too, what man of seventy will agree with a man of thirty as to the comparative merits of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand? How few read "Uncle Tom's Cabin," compared with the multitudes who read that most powerful and popular book forty years ago? How changing, if not transient, is the fame of the novelist as well as of the poet! With reference ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... was first reduced to writing—or at least put into literary form—by Honore de Balzac, and appeared under the title of "The Napoleon of the People" in the third chapter of Balzac's "Country Doctor." It purports to be the story of Napoleon's life and career as related to a group of French peasants by one of his old soldiers—a man named Goguelat. It covers more time chronologically ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... than you believe; worse in execution than you could realize, even if I confessed all, which I have not the slightest intention of doing. Ah, Dr. Grey, if you read me thoroughly, you would not be surprised, or consider it presumptuous that I sometimes think I am that anomalous creature, whom Balzac defined as 'Angel through love, demon through fantasy, child through faith, sage through experience, man through the brain, woman through the heart, giant through hope, and poet ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... become so neglected, and was so lacking in cultivation; so little adapted to poetry, that the nation seemed in danger of losing all its earlier traditions. For a hundred years France was given over to profane and light literature. Montaigne, Charyon, Ronsard and de Balzac are some of the names of this period. The death of a cat or dog was made the subject of a poem that was no real poetry. It is due to the women of France—to Madame de Rambouillet and her confreres, and to the literary coteries that arose in the middle of the seventeenth century—that ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... to-day with your list of accomplishments, but it begins to shrink from this hour like the Peau de Chagrin of Balzac's story. Do not worry about it, for all the while there will be making out for you an ampler and fairer parchment, signed by old Father Time himself as President of that great University in which experience is the one perpetual and ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... thorough a remnant of the exaggerations and bad taste of the Empire as were the straight, stiff, mock-classical articles of furniture of the Imperialist hotels, or the or-moulu clocks so ridiculed by Balzac, on which turbaned Mamelukes mourned their expiring steeds. All the false-heroics of the literature of the Empire found their representative (their last one, perhaps) in Mme. Sophie Gay, and it has not been sufficiently remarked that she even transmitted a shade ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... was room for real heroes. He idolized his authors as he idolized none of his characters. There is something of moral passion in the reverence with which he writes of the labours of Flaubert and Balzac and Stevenson ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... preparing the 'Paris Sketch Book.' It was in 1850 that Dumas published the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne'; and it was in 1852 that Thackeray put forth 'Henry Esmond.' But it was back in 1829 that the commandant Hulot in Balzac's 'Chouans' had broken his sword across his knee rather than carry out an order that seemed to him unworthy. This is not quite the same effect that we find in 'La Favorite'; but none the less Scribe may have been indebted to Balzac ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... the climate of Rome was considered by Dr Gresonowsky more suitable for winter, and towards the close of November they took their departure, flying from the Florentine tramontana. The carriage was furnished with novels of Balzac, and Pen's pony was of the party. The rooms taken in the Via del Tritone were bright and sunny; but a rash visit to the jeweller Castellani, to see and touch the swords presented by Roman citizens to Napoleon III. and Victor Emmanuel, threw back Mrs Browning into all her former troubles of a delicate ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... great feeder. You must dispense terrapin, and canvas-back ducks, and rare brands of champagne, in lordly dining-halls, or your place is certain to be secondary. You may, if a man, have the manners of a Chesterfield and the wit of a Balzac; you may, if a woman, be beautiful as Mary Stuart and brilliant as DeStael, and yet, powerless to "entertain," you can fill no lofty pedestal. "Position" in New York means a corpulent purse whose strings work as flexibly as the dorsal muscles of a professional toady. And this kind of toady has ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... thousand dollars—maybe. But I'm wasting your precious time, Jim," he continued. "Get out your pen, and ink, and paper, and get busy;—eight dime novels of thirty thousand words apiece—two hundred and forty thousand words a day for five days! Shades of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac!" ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... lay-figures upon which he piles and adjusts his gorgeous cloth-of-gold and figured damask. But Siebenkaes and his wife, in "Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces," are characters, quite as much as any of Balzac's nice genre men and women, and on a higher plane. Richter uses his persons of both sexes principally to express the conditions of his feeling; they are cockles, alternately dry and sparkling, underneath his mighty ebb ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Mann are both of North German extraction and have both settled in Munich; both are moreover very similar in their high esthetic culture and in a certain languid aristocracy of feeling and ironical reticence; and their literary models (Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Fontane) were the same. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... entitled "De Ludicra Dictione" was written A.D. 1658, at the request of the celebrated M. Balzac (though published after his death), for the purpose of showing that the burlesque style of writing adopted by Scarron and D'Assouci, and at that time so popular in France, had no sanction from the ancient classic writers. Francisci Vavassoris ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... French writers are liable to the same reproach. Voiture, Balzac, even Coraeneille, have too much affected those ambitious ornaments, of which the Italians in general, and the least pure of the ancients, supplied them with so many models. And it was not till late, that observation and reflection gave rise to a more natural ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... They none of them got up till twelve to a languid breakfast, and then read novels. Hazlet, who was rather shocked at this, did indeed faintly suggest going to church. "Oh yes," said Bruce, looking up with a smile from his Balzac, "we'll do that, or some other equally harmless amusement." The dinner hour, however, coincided with the time of evening service, so that it was impossible to go then, and finally they spent the evening in what they all ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... conscience!" Then looking at her from between his arms, he plunged his eyes into hers. "I have heard some talk of the mad passion of a certain Entragues," he went on wildly. "Ever since their grandfather, the soldier Balzac, married a viscontessa at Milan that family hold ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... swallowed his breakfast, and returned to closer inspection of the correspondence. The first letter which he opened was written by the editor of an English "Quarterly," informing him that his recent critique on Balzac had found favor in high places, and that the "Quarterly" would like ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac,[13] and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... elementary education especially needs a literary interpretation. It needs a literary artist who will portray to the public in the form of fiction the real life of the elementary school,—who will idealize the technique of teaching as Kipling idealized the technique of the marine engineer, as Balzac idealized the technique of the journalist, as Du Maurier and a hundred other novelists have idealized the technique of the artist. We need some one to exploit our shop-talk on the reading public, and to show up our work as you and I know it, not as you and I have been told ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... conversed much with clever men of all kinds. All her ideas, all her feelings revolved round Paris. Panshin turned the conversation upon literature; it seemed that, like himself, she read only French books. George Sand drove her to exasperation, Balzac she respected, but he wearied her; in Sue and Scribe she saw great knowledge of human nature, Dumas and Feval she adored. In her heart she preferred Paul de Kock to all of them, but of course she did not even mention his name. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... dramatist and physician are closely, almost inseparably, allied," is it not true that the analytical faculty so essential to the latter is rarely found in connection with great creative ability? Sainte-Beuve never forgave Balzac for saying that critics were unsuccessful authors, but he should have consoled himself with the of the jesters, but many of them very beautiful; and there are three more in The Brides' Tragedy. Since the days ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... Death (1898), contained some stories of an epic dignity and a dramatic rhythm that challenged attention and secured interest for the works that followed. These were another volume of fiction, one of poetry, some plays and a number of translations from Taine, Flaubert, Balzac, and other French writers, which are remarkable specimens of his ability to grasp the spirit of a foreign world and to convey its essence through the medium of his native tongue. It seems natural that ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... This is notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the modern 'Literature of Horror,' and the two literatures are morally identical. We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought against the School of Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply to the average tragedy of the whole period preceding ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... In Balzac's unique story, "A Passion in the Desert," a question is asked: "How did their friendship end?" The answer is, "Like all great passions—in a misunderstanding. One suspects the other. One is too proud to ask for an explanation and the other too stubborn ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... student-friends venting itself in such collegians' pranks as parading deserted quarters of the town by moonlight, in the small hours, chanting lugubrious strains to astonish the shopkeepers. The only great celebrity whose acquaintance she had made was Balzac, himself the prince of eccentrics. Although he did not encourage Madame Dudevant's literary ambition, he showed himself kindly disposed towards her and her young friends, and she gives some amusing instances that came under her notice of his oddities. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Vieuxtemps. In Paganini's and Locatelli's works the effect, comparatively speaking, lies in the mechanics; but Vieuxtemps is the great artist who made the instrument take the road of romanticism which Hugo, Balzac and Gauthier trod in literature. And before all the violin was made to charm, to move, and Vieuxtemps knew it. Like Rubinstein, he held that the artist must first of all have ideas, emotional power—his technic must be so perfected that he does not have to think of it! Incidentally, speaking ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... to the "Best Stories," and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthy to go into such company. His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led him to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and Smollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Bernardin St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "Three Months under the Snow," and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... fascinating but gloomy philosophy and metaphysics upon the underlying principle of an active form of energy which he called the Will-to-Live, which he considered to be the Thing-in-Itself, or the Absolute. Balzac, the novelist, considered a something akin to Will, to be the moving force of the Universe. Bulwer advanced a similar theory, and made mention of it in several of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... like the rest, but it was odd enough to notice that they stood close together, touching each other, while all the rest were straggling and separate. I observed that peculiar atmospheric flavor which has been described by Mr. Balzac, (the French story-teller who borrows so many things from some of our American loading writers,) under the name of odeur de pension. It is, as one may say, an olfactory perspective of an endless vista of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... names upon the walls of Philae. Once, as I sat alone there, I felt strongly attracted to look upward to a wall, as if some personality, enshrined within the stone, were watching me, or calling. I looked, and saw written "Balzac." ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... employed rather in perfecting than in forming works. His muse is compared to a fine woman in the pangs of delivery. He exulted in his tardiness, and, after finishing a poem of one hundred verses, or a discourse of ten pages, he used to say he ought to repose for ten years. Balzac, the first writer in French prose who gave majesty and harmony to a period, did not grudge to expend a week on a page, never satisfied with his first thoughts. Our "costive" Gray entertained the same notion: and it is hard to say if ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the book-shelf which lies between the rows of books and the wall. Don't you think so, Lady Carmian?" (to the lady on his other side). "I assure you I have made the most delightful discoveries of this description. Cheap editions of Ouida, Balzac's works, yellow backs of the most advanced order, will, as a rule, reward the inquirer, who otherwise might have had to content himself with 'The Heir of Redclyffe,' the Lily Series, and ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... but whom Madame de Pommeraye triumphantly reveals to him on the morning after his marriage as a creature whose past history has been one of notorious depravity. This disagreeable story, of which Balzac would have made a masterpiece, is told in an interesting way, and the humoristic machinery by which the narrative is managed is less tiresome than usual. It is at least a story with meaning, purpose, and character. It is neither a jumble without savour or point, nor is it rank and gross like half ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... its parody of Charles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision filled out a couple of years further on by his Daddy Hardacre in a two-acts version of a Parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's Eugenie Grandet. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of his highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, is the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... alone occupied more space than all the great classics of the eighteenth century. Copious narrations of the French defeats of 1870 had been extracted from La Debacle of Zola. Neither Montaigne, nor La Rochefoucauld, nor La Bruyere, nor Diderot, nor Stendhal, nor Balzac, nor Flaubert appeared. On the other hand, Pascal, who did not appear in the other book, found a place in this as a curiosity; and Christophe learned by the way that the convulsionary "was one of the fathers of Port-Royal, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... it appears rather the caution of a tyrant grown timid through age. The conspiracy is, with a splendid narration, thrust into the background; it does not excite in us that gloomy apprehension which so theatrical an object ought to do. Emilia, the soul of the piece, is called by the witty Balzac, when commending the work, "an adorable fury." Yet the Furies themselves could be appeased by purifications and expiations: but Emilia's heart is inaccessible to the softening influences of benevolence and generosity; the adoration of so unfeminine a creature ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... thoroughly frantic with delight. "Poor thing!" I said, "you are lonely, no wonder." I had given him a new and shining cage, a green curtain, a sunny window; but of what avail are these to a desolate heart? Who does not know that the soul may starve in splendor? "Solitude," says Balzac, I think, "is a fine thing; but it is also a fine thing to have some one to whom you can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing." I know that I am but a poor substitute for a canary-bird,—a gross and sorry ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... demerits in public estimation. The 'deities' hold that those who run down the institution are all, without exception, poor creatures who cannot get in. For the strong apparent instances to the contrary, there was a reason in each case. I ventured to mention the great name of Balzac, a man from our country. But the playwright Desminieres, who used to manage the amateur theatricals at Compiegne, burst out with 'Balzac! But did you know him? Do you know, sir, the sort of man he was? An utter Bohemian! A man, sir, who never had a guinea in his pocket! I had it ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... boy, and even in the prime of life, I knew nothing of Racine. I now bend my head in adoration. Again, I knew little or nothing of Balzac. I now think of him as one of the greatest of the analysts of human conduct,—not as great as Shakespeare, but, all the same, very great, and almost as terrible as he is great. If ever a man fascinates and is ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... mourns at his misfortunes, promises him long before hand to the world; and when the world, by its sins, is unworthy to possess him longer, heaven, which calls him home, hangs out new lights, etc. With this hyperbole M. Balzac regaled Cardinal Richelieu, adding, that to form such a minister, universal nature was on the stretch; God gives him first by promise, and makes him the expectation of ages. For this he was attacked by the critics, but he defended himself; alleging, that other panegyrics ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibilities of bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smiling province; a region of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic, rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace himself even, to go in search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources of this amiable cynicism. He must have a vague conviction that he can only lose by almost any change. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... un bon vin meuble mon estomac, Je suis plus savant que Balzac— Plus sage que Pibrac; Mon brass seul faisant l'attaque De la nation Coseaque, La mettroit au sac; De Charon je passerois le lac, En dormant dans son bac; J'irois au fier Eac, Sans que mon coeur fit tic ni tac, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to, the ideals which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. Is it possible for any nationality to make such a defense of its isolation? If not, let us read Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoi, men so much greater than any we can show, try to absorb their universal wisdom, and no longer confine ourselves to local traditions. But nationality was never so strong in Ireland as at the present time. It is beginning to be felt, less as a political movement than as a ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... unsupplied, and his patron, Cardinal Lewis, did not make up for this meanness. Voltaire, therefore, had reason to indulge in a cynical sneer at the glowing accounts of his visit given by Italian writers; and Balzac's statement that Tasso left France in the same suit of clothes that he brought with him, after having worn it for a year, is not without foundation. This shabby treatment, however, was part of a wider State policy. The year of Tasso's ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... for that I might be a millionaire or the President of the United States or the leading American Author, bound in Red Russia leather. I might have been a Set of Books, like Sir Walter Scott or Dickens or Balzac, and when people passed my house the natives would say, "No, that isn't the city hall or the court-house; that's where Butler lives." Of course some strangers would say, "Butler, the grocer?" but ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... 'You don't know Balzac, my friend,' went on the young man in a conversational tone, 'or I would tell you that, like Rastignac, war is declared between ourselves and society; but if you have not the knowledge you have the will, and that is enough for me. Come, let us make the first ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... mythology, and at one side two or three other volumes, which Sommers took up with more interest. One was a book on psychology—a large modern work on the subject. A second was an antiquated popular treatise on "Diseases of the Mind." Another volume was an even greater surprise—Balzac's Une Passion dans la Desert, a well-dirtied copy from the public library. They were fierce condiments ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the harmony and beauty of the whole, which make one realize that the individual parts have received all proper attention. What really brings about this apparent simplicity which insures the success of the story? It has been admirably expressed in a passage from Henry James' lecture on Balzac: ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... as a novelist that the fame of Claretie will endure. He has followed the footsteps of George Sand and of Balzac. He belongs to the school of "Impressionists," and, although he has a liking for exceptional situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result is, above all ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... for instance, she describes an ascetic nature as it has never been done in any other work of fiction. Newman himself has not written passages of deeper or purer mysticism, of more sincere spirituality. Balzac, in Seraphita, attempted something of the kind, but the result was never more than a tour de force. He could invent, he could describe, but George Sand felt; and as she felt, she composed, living with and loving with an understanding love all her creations. But it has to be remembered ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... early age. Lamartine was her favourite bard from the period when she first could feel: and she had subsequently improved her mind by a sedulous study of novels of the great modern authors of the French language. There was not a romance of Balzac and George Sand which the indefatigable little creature had not devoured—by the time she was sixteen: and, however little she sympathised with her relatives at home, she had friends, as she said, in the spirit-world, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the legend is to Rossetti's what a story in the London Journal is to a story by Balzac. The Virgin has apparently wandered outside the town. She is dressed in a long white garment neither beautiful nor explicit: is it a nightdress, or a piece of conventional drapery? On the right there is a long, silly tree, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... The Barriere du Combat is not the Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as though Caesar were looking on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet, but, if Virgil haunted the Roman wine-shop, David d'Angers, Balzac and Charlet have sat at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns. Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails prosper there. Adonai passes on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder and lightning; Silenus makes his entry there on his ass. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... never did it out of choice: I was either in haste, or Virgil gave me no occasion for the ornament of words; for it seldom happens but a monosyllable line turns verse to prose, and even that prose is rugged and unharmonious. Philarchus, I remember, taxes Balzac for placing twenty monosyllables in file without one ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... the drunken Goths reel upon Rome and heard the careless Negroes yodle as they galloped to Toomsville. Paris, she knew,—wonderful, haunting Paris: the Paris of Clovis, and St. Louis; of Louis the Great, and Napoleon III; of Balzac, and her own Dumas. She tasted the mud and comfort of thick old London, and the while wept with Jeremiah and sang with Deborah, Semiramis, and Atala. Mary of Scotland and Joan of Arc held her dark hands in theirs, and Kings lifted ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Robson in the dramas I have named was extended, and was genuine. In Daddy Hardacre, a skilful adaptation of the usurer in Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless Overreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of "Evelyn Innes" (I think the passage has been dropped out of the second) Ulick Dean says that one should be careful what one writes, for what one writes will happen. Well, perhaps what Balzac wrote has happened, and I may have done no more than to realise one of his ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... Germanic philosophies. Finally he took a course of law at Columbia University. The influence of this somewhat heterogeneous seminary life is manifest in all his future writing. Beginning, no doubt, as a disciple of Emerson in New England, he fell under the spell of Balzac in Paris, of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann in Germany. Pages might be brought forward as evidence that he had a thorough classical education. His knowledge of languages made it easy for him to drink deeply at many fountain heads. If Oscar Wilde found ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... French drama, so far as I am acquainted with it, is a disease. It deals with the abnormal. It is fashioned after Balzac. It exhibits moral tumors, mental cancers and all kinds of abnormal fungi,—excrescences. Everything is stood on its head; virtue lives in the brothel; the good are the really bad and the worst are, after all, the best. It portrays ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... on Heroic Poetry," serving as Preface to The Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, reveals something of its author's erudition. Among the critics, he was familiar with Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Dionysius of Halicarnasseus, Heinsius, Bochart, Balzac, Rapin, Le Bossu, and Boileau. But this barely hints at the extent of his learning. In the notes on the poem itself the author displays an interest in classical scholarship, Biblical commentary, ecclesiastical history, scientific inquiry, linguistics and ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... didn't smack of genius; a notion that he was a superior sort of Sherlock Holmes, having the truffle-hound's flair for discovering and following up clews and unraveling mysteries, most of which didn't exist outside of his own eager mind; and such a genuine passion for old and beautiful things as Balzac had. It was upon this last foundation ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... performance, with little touches that recall both Balzac and Meredith. Mr. Hope, being disinclined to follow any of the beaten tracks of romance writing, is endowed with exceeding originality."—New ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... on the table for him, he told his comrade who the two authors were, and promised to explain it all to him, and there wasn't a sign of show-off in it either. As for the Child of the Regiment, he wanted a Balzac, and when I showed him where they were, he picked out "Eugenie Grandet," and they both ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... all of these things to the schoolmistress, or not,—whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon,—whether I cribbed them from Balzac,—whether I dipped them from the ocean of Tupperian wisdom,—or whether I have just found them in my head, laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I cannot say. Wise men have said ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... pessimistically from shelf to shelf, his eye wandering among the titles of the books. The library consisted almost entirely of handsome "uniform editions": Irving, Poe, Cooper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Burns, Longfellow, Tennyson, Hume, Gibbon, Prescott, Thackeray, Dickens, De Musset, Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, Goethe, Schiller, Dante, and Tasso. There were shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, of anthologies, of "famous classics," of "Oriental masterpieces," of "masterpieces of oratory," and more shelves of "selected libraries" of "literature," of ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... flock of sheep passed me with their shepherd, who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I was 'smoking the enchanted cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... return to Ferrara, he was not only received into the service of the duke with a salary of some fifteen golden scudi a-month, but told that he was exempted from any particular duty, and might attend in peace to his studies. Balzac affirms, that while Tasso was at the court of France, he was so poor as to beg a crown from a friend; and that, when he left it, he had the same coat on his back that he came in.[5] The assertions of a professed wit and hyperbolist ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what your ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... novelists, who are certainly not prigs, and whose morality is by no means that of tracts? We might have expected a priori that they would have summarily put him down, as a hopeless Philistine. Yet Richardson was idolised by some of their best writers; Balzac, for example, and George Sand, speak of him with reverence; and a writer who is, perhaps, as odd a contrast to Richardson as could well be imagined—Alfred de Musset—calls 'Clarissa' le premier roman du monde. What is the secret which ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... have attained their present form without the intervention of type. It is well known that Carlyle rewrote his books in proof, so that the printer, instead of attempting to correct his galleys, reset them outright. Balzac went a step further, and largely wrote his novels in proof, if such an expression may be allowed. He so altered and expanded them that what went to the printing office as copy for a novelette finally came out of it a full-sized novel. Even where the changes are not so extensive, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... born of centuried servitude. How her husband ever fascinated so fascinatingly elusive a creature is a mystery to all who know him and a miracle to all who know her; but who has ever guessed the riddle of a woman's heart? Surely no man yet known to the world, except possibly Balzac, and he only occasionally by some sort of electric, psychological accident. The true story of Mrs. Blaine's infelicities has been carefully hidden from the public, although some superserviceable, would-be friends have now and then busied themselves ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... battle of life as 'tis fought in Paris. We will show you the fever and the heartache, the corroding care and the panting labor which oppress life in Paris. Then will you say, No wonder they all die of a shattered heart or consumed brain at Paris! No wonder De Balzac died of heart-disease! No wonder Frederic Soulie's heart burst! No wonder Bruffault went crazy, and Eugene Sue's heart collapsed, and Malitourne lives at the mad-house! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... M.P., Sub-Rosa of the Daily News and Leader. Although his pen has probably covered more pages than Balzac's, this is the first time Sub-Rosa has really "turned author." The charm and penetration of the result suggest that his readers will never allow him to turn back again. He is a born essayist, but he has, in addition, the ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... Lyre, says, "This is a colossally cerebral book. By the side of Tripe, Balzac is a bungling beginner and ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... needed, and so little likely to be published, we need novelists' maps and topographies of London and Paris. These will probably be constructed by some American of leisure; they order these things better in America. When we go to Paris we want to know where Balzac's men and women lived, Z. Marcas and Cesar Birotteau, and Le Cousin Pons, and Le Pere Goriot, and all the duchesses, financiers, scoundrels, journalists, and persons of both sexes and no character "Comedie Humaine." London also might be thus spaced out—the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Law, and the old concept of rewards and punishments has been re-stated as 'the survival of the fittest.' If, on the other hand, you need emotions, and the inspiration of concrete teaching, you must go to Balzac, to Turgenief, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... end, if I should wait for seven or eight years more, now that I can no longer write. Happily, there is nothing to fear. But what I have suffered since I have been incapable of writing, and have felt my hoard of gold shrink and diminish in my hand like the Magic Skin of Balzac, is frightful. Now you understand me, do you not? and you will no longer bid me take care of myself. No; if you still pray to God, ask him to send me speedily ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... books as the 'Arabian Nights,' Le Grand's collections of ancient Norman tales, and Balzac's 'Contes Drolatiques' should be included here; perhaps de natura they should be classed rather with 'Facetiae and Curiosa.' The literature upon this subject is a large one, and there is an excellent list of writings upon Minstrels, Mysteries, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city where men of wealth and power in affairs ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... that the shoe in question must have been of a hard or metallic substance which could not be pressed out of shape. In the form endeared to most European children of the upper classes by Charles Perrault, the slipper is made of glass. It was first suggested by Balzac that Perrault's pantoffles de verre was due to his misunderstanding of the pantoffles de vair, or fur (the word vair is still used to indicate this in heraldry), which he had heard from his nurse or other folk-tale informant. But the step-sisters would not have ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... whole together with fanciful set designs of stitching. When about a foot on either side was wholly quilted, it was rolled upon its bar, and the work went on; thus the visible quilt diminished, like Balzac's Peau de Chagrin, in a united and truly sociable work that required no special attention, in which all were facing together and all drawing closer together as the afternoon passed in intimate gossip. Sometimes several quilts were set up. I ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... terror of a howling mob, can see only theatrical exaggeration in the enthusiasm for a land of freedom, just as, never having known or never having had eyes to see the grotesque and tragic creatures existing all around us, he has doubted the reality of some of Balzac's creations. It is to be feared that for such a play as The Melting Pot Mr. Walkley is far from being the [Greek: charieis] of Aristotle. The ideal spectator must have known and felt more of life than Mr. Walkley, who resembles too much the library-fed man of letters ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... returned with those that came by the evening mail; gave them to the judge for examination, and then went up to his room to spend the evening in reading law and comparing notes. He allowed himself no recreation and but little rest. His soul was sustained by what Balzac calls "the divine patience of genius." And the more he was enabled to measure himself with other men, the more confidence he acquired in his own powers. This severe mental labor took away much of the pain ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... of the death of Honore De Balzac, one of the most eminent French writers of the nineteenth century. "Eighteen months ago," says a Paris letter, "already attacked by dropsy, he quitted France to contract a marriage with a Russian lady, to whom he was devotedly attached. To her he ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Poe and the grim realities of Balzac would not serve to describe that chase. The magnificent vitality of that man Haggerty yet fills me with wonder. He borrowed a roadster from Killigrew's garage, and hummed away toward New York. On the way he laid his plans of battle, winnowed the chaff from the grain. He understood ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... book should be in praise of action, the thing that makes the world go round; of force, however misspent, which is the sum of life as distinguished from the inertia of death. In the forty-odd years of his life he wrote almost as many pages as Balzac, most of it mere newspaper copy, it is true, read and forgotten, but all of it vigorous and with the stamp of a strong man upon it. And he played just as hard as he worked—alas, it was the play that killed him! The young artist who illustrated ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... smaller houses on the main street the light in the window burned late. Leroy Carmichael was alone in his office reading Balzac's story of "The Country Doctor." He was not a gloomy or despondent person, but the spirit of the night had entered into him. He had yielded himself, as young men of ardent temperament often do, to the subduing magic of the fall. In his ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... my slight acquaintance with that tremendous philosopher, supposing that he were turned loose among a bevy of perfectly well-educated women, and meant mischief, I should be disposed to lay longer odds against his chances than I would against those of many men who have never read one word of Balzac, Michelet, or Kant. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... the most characteristic and original of the author's works. And wherever we notice this quality in a story, we call it Hawthornish. "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," is Hawthornish; so is "Peter Schemil, the Man without a Shadow"; or Balzac's "Peau de Chagrin"; or later work, some of it manifestly inspired by Hawthorne, like Stevenson's tale of a double personality, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; or Edward Bellamy's "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process"—a process for ensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things—a modern water of Lethe. Even ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... imaginative portrayal of human life. The favorite vehicle of imagination has been the novel. If our successors hereafter desire to know how man in the nineteenth century appeared to himself, their best guides will be such as Scott, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hugo, Balzac. It is the children of Bacon and those of Shakspere who are most conspicuous in the work of yesterday. To-day we seem to stand on the threshold of a more inclusive, more profound, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no Rembrandt, no Balzac, no greater Tolstoi in English letters? I want to liberate Englishmen so far as I can from the tyranny of Shakespeare's greatness. For the new time is upon us, with its new knowledge and new claims, and we English are all ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... out over the globe was sucked back again with no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the past once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful and yet ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Scandinavian writer, where the strain of blood is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition unbroken, the precise impact of historical and personal influences more easy to estimate. I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided man, a multifarious writer, a personality that makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing and labelling processes of professional criticism. And yet with what perfect precision of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, for example, or Brunetiere, in their ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... already been some excellent artists who occupied themselves with vignette drawings, like Tony Johannot and Celestin Nanteuil, whose pretty and smart frontispieces are to be found in the old editions of Balzac. The genius of Honore Daumier and the high fancy of Gavarni and of Grevin had already announced a serious protest of modern sentiment against academic taste, in returning on many points to the free tradition of Eisen, of the two Moreaus and of Debucourt. ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... in brown paper. "Mostyn, they have a most wonderful reading- circle here in the mountains. I have quit trying to keep pace with them." He held the parcel toward Dolly. "I heard you say all of you wanted to know something of Balzac's philosophy. I find that he has expressed it in his novels Louis Lambert and Seraphita. The introductions in both these volumes are very ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... "The Balzac of Dartmore. It is easy and true to say that Mr. Phillpotts in all his work has done no single piece of portraiture better than this presentation of Philip Ouldsbroom.... A triumph of the novelist's understanding ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Revolution, and eagerly devouring it before the sap-bush fire; a Milton, elaborating "Paradise Lost" in a world he could not see; a Thackeray, struggling on cheerfully after his "Vanity Fair" was refused by a dozen publishers; a Balzac, toiling and waiting in a lonely garret; men whom neither poverty, debt, nor hunger could discourage or intimidate; not daunted by privations, not hindered by discouragements. It wants men who can work ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... [Footnote 3361: Balzac has closely studied and admirably portrayed this type in a "Menage de Garcon."—See other similar characters in Merimee ("Les Mecontens," and "les Espagnols en Danemark"); in Stendhal ("le Chasseur vert"). I knew five or six of them ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Mr Browning's work. Tennyson was in a cheap seven-and-six edition; then came Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, two novels by Rhoda Broughton, Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, and Smollett; the complete works of Balzac, Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Salammbo, L'Assommoir; add to this Carlyle, Byron, Shelley, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys, the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity, Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the English novel; and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... parties of these six centuries—Crusaders, Covenanters, Cavaliers, Roundheads, Papists, Jews, Gypsies, Rebels—start into life again, and fight or give a reason for the faith that is in them. No other novelist in England, and only Balzac in France, approaches Scott in the scope of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the Capital of the German Empire! There are many respects in which it nevertheless hasn't yet succeeded in taking on the character of a cosmopolitan city." [2] Not even literature finds material for a city novel. There is no Balzac, no Thackeray. Germany is still dominated by the village and the town. Goethe, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Heyse, Gottfried Keller, Freytag, my unread favorite "Fritz" Reuter, deal not with the life of cities. There is as yet no drama, no novel, no art, no politics ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... he was studying history for its facts and principles, and fiction for its scenery and portraits. In "The North American Review" for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom he was an admirer, but with no blind worship. The readers of this great story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who "made twenty assaults upon fame and had forty books killed under him" before he achieved success, will find his genius fully appreciated and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he would be justified in tracing back to sexual impulses. Goethe, as my correspondent informs me, looked upon love of woman as a means of increasing his aesthetic sensibilities, and my correspondent seems to think that he did them wrong thereby, whereas I think he honored them exceedingly. Balzac held the contrary belief, so Gautier tells us, maintaining that great spiritual elation could be gained by restraint, and when inquiry was made into his precise beliefs on this point he confessed that he ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... literature not usually accounted part of the ghostly canon. There are the novels and tales whose argument is the tragedy of a haunted mind. Such are Dickens' Haunted Man, in which the ghost is memory; Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, in which the ghost is cruel conscience; and Balzac's Quest of the Absolute, in which the old Flemish house of Balthasar Claes, in the Rue de Paris at Douai, is haunted by a daemon more potent than that of Canidia. One might add some of Balzac's shorter stories, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... demolished the inhuman puppets of romanticism and rescued our literature from the clutches of booby idealists and sex-starved old maids. It has created visible and tangible human beings—after Balzac—and put them in accord with their surroundings. It has carried on the work, which romanticism began, of developing the language. Some of the naturalists have had the veritable gift of laughter, a very few have had the gift of tears, and, in spite of what you say, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... in the child's heart, as though it had been nursed on honor while it was in its mother's womb; for most truly is honor a prenatal influence, being closely bound up with strong family consciousness. "In losing the solidarity of families," says Balzac, "society has lost the fundamental force which Montesquieu named Honor." Indeed, the sense of shame seems to me to be the earliest indication of the moral consciousness of our race. The first and worst punishment which befell humanity in consequence of tasting "the fruit of that ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus, just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the fin de siecle scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation, erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... belonged to that class of men whom that witty writer, Balzac, so delightfully calls les hommes predestines in his Physiologie du Mariage. Without doubt, he was a very good-looking man, but he bore that stamp of insignificance which so often conceals coarseness and vulgarity, and was one of those men who, in the long ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of Major Frazer, the obstreperous fooleries of Lord Henry Seymour, the studied extravagances of Comte d'Alton-Shee, created in the public mind the impression that the club was nothing less than a sort of infernal pit, peopled by wicked dandies like Balzac's De Marsay, Maxime de Trailles, Rastignac, etc. Even the box of the club at the opera was dubbed with the uncanny nickname loge infernale, and the talk of the town ran upon the frightful sums lost and won every night at the tables of the exclusive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... principles are not sufficient for the development of a system. Probably nobody will doubt some of the more common statements; all will grant with Winkelmann that a beautiful hand is in keeping with a beautiful soul; or with Balzac that people of considerable intellect have handsome hands, or in calling the hand man's second face. But when specific co-ordinations of the hand are made these meet with much doubt. So for example, Esser[1] ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... entrusted by Fate to the most casual assemblage of irresponsible young men (all, however, older than myself) that, as if drunk with Provencal sunshine, frittered life away in joyous levity on the model of Balzac's "Histoire des Treize" qualified by a dash of romance de ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... diction, they employed only a pretentious and conceitedly affected style, which became highly ridiculous; instead of improving the national idiom they completely spoilt it. Where formerly D'Urfe, Malherbe, Racan, Balzac, and Voiture reigned, Chapelain, Scudry, Mnage, and the Abb Cotin, "the father of the French Riddle," ruled in their stead. Moreover, every lady in Paris, as well as in the provinces, no matter what her education was, held her drawing-room, where nothing was heard ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... peer from the shop windows at hesitant purchasers like the articles of virtu flung before the bewildered gaze of readers by Balzac in his Wild ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... Men-Ka-Ra. They could not but be "carried off their feet" by such pictures of a past still so near them. Nor had they other great novelists to weaken the force of Scott's impressions. They had not to compare him with the melancholy mirth of Thackeray, and the charm, the magic of his style. Balzac was of the future; of the future was the Scott of France,—the boyish, the witty, the rapid, the brilliant, the inexhaustible Dumas. Scott's generation had no scruples abort "realism," listened to no sermons on the glory of the commonplace; like Dr. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... life and end when they get through, without informing the reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try to interest this reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and Anthony {585} Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in sociology, honest reports of the writer's impressions, which may not be without a ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... more time to defend a tragedy by a great collection of authorities, than to write it; and I am supposing the same number of pages in the tragedy and in the defence. Heinsius perhaps bestowed more time in defending his Herodes infanticida against Balzac, than a Spanish (or a Scotch) metaphysician bestows on a large volume of controversy, where he takes all from his own stock." I am somewhat concerned in the truth of this principle. There are articles in the present work occupying but a few pages, which could never have been produced had ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... drawing a low wicker chair near the couch and putting her music on the floor beside her. "I shall be glad to stay if you want me to. Shall we talk?" And here she took up the books he had put beside him for amusement. "Balzac, Daudet." She made a ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... leather chairs on each side of the fireplace, broad tables carrying only the essential lamps and ashtrays, a shabby desk where Richard kept personal papers, and bookshelves crammed with novels. Harriet, making a timid round, saw Balzac and Dickens, Dumas and Fielding, several Shakespeares and a complete Meredith, jostling elbows with modern novels in bright jackets, and yellow French ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Ring and the Book' for the first time without much mental effort; but you will do well not to believe them. These poems are difficult—they cannot help being so. What is 'The Ring and the Book'? A huge novel in 20,000 lines—told after the method not of Scott but of Balzac; it tears the hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten different points of view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and description: you are let off nothing. As with a schoolboy's life at a large school, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... shoulders, made some critical remark about the place accorded Balzac's letters to Madam Hanska, which caused Georgia to retort that perhaps it would be better if people arranged their own libraries, and then they could put things where they wanted them. Then after she had given a resting place to what she denounced as some very disreputable French ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... difficult, Anna, to find in the history of our manners and morals a subject that is worthy of your eyes, that no choice has been left me; but perhaps you will be made to feel how fortunate your fate is when you read the story sent to you by Your old friend, De Balzac. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... to trace this quotation, which may possibly be from the Mishkat-ul-Masabih (ante, Chapter 5, note 10). Compare '"There is nothing more horrible than the rebellion of a sheep", said de Marsay' (Balzac, Lost by ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... remarkable that Balzac, dealing as he did with traits of character and the minute and daily circumstances of life, has never been accused of representing actual persons in the two or three thousand portraits which he painted ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... littered office of The Mass (where the bulk of the editorial work fell to me), the money was almost invariably devoted to the entertainment of Beatrice. She was in several ways not unlike a kitten, or something feline, of larger growth: the panther, for example, in Balzac's thrilling story, "A Passion in ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson |
